Augustus de Morgan

On November 27, 1852, Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace passed away, who is considered to be the world’s very first computer programmer. Every student of computer science has most probably heart of Ada Countess of Lovelace, assistant to mathematician Charles Babbage, [1] inventor of the very first programmable (mechanical) computer, the analytical engine. Although probably not widely known to the general public, there are Ada Lovelace tuition programs for girls, a programming language called…

Augustus de Morgan (1806-1871) On June 27, 1806, British mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan was born. He formulated De Morgan‘s laws and introduced the term mathematical induction, a method of mathematical proof typically used to establish a given statement for all natural numbers. As a computer scientist, I am of course familiar with De Morgan‘s laws, which are fundamental for Boolean logic. De Morgan‘s laws are merely transformation rules for two of…

On December 8, 1864, British mathematician and logician George Boole passed away. He is best known as the inventor of the prototype of what is now called Boolean logic, which became the basis of the modern digital computer. Thus, Boole also is regarded as one of the founders of the field of computer science. “It appeared to me that, although Logic might be viewed with reference to the idea of quantity, it…